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AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 


MOSES COIT TYLER. 


A MEMORIAL ADDRESS 


BY 


GEORGE L. BURR, 

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PROFESSOR, CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



(From the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1901, 

Vol. I, pages 187-195.) 


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WASHINGTON: 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 

1902 . 
















V 

1 


VIII-MOSES COIT TYLER. 


By GEORGE L. BURR, 

PROFESSOR, CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 






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MOSES COIT TYLER. 


A MEMORIAL ADDRESS, BY GEORGE L. BURR. 

The first year of a new century has rolled away since 
together at the University of Michigan we listened to the 
tidings that Moses Coit Tyler was gone. Then already, in 
words than which none could be more tender and adequate, 
our grief w as given utterance by his old friend and leader 
who announced to us his death . a You yourselves in formal 
resolution paid reverent tribute to his worth; and the snows 
of another winter now lie deep on the palm wreath which you 
laid upon his grave. 

And yet—let us not turn from that quiet gTave on the hill- 
crest without some effort to set down in more deliberate words 
the meaning of his life. I shall not claim for it many minutes 
of this busy session. Since pledging myself to this task I 
have also undertaken, at the wish of his family, to compile 
that more elaborate memorial which we hoped from a mem¬ 
ber of his own household; and much which I might else have 
wished to put on record here may better wait for that. I 
hope you will not count it amiss if here and now I take occa¬ 
sion to ask your help in this my larger enterprise. Some of 
you have known him longer than I; a few perhaps even bet¬ 
ter. Will } r ou not help me by any suggestion which can make 
that memorial more worthy; and, above all, by the sharing of 
anything of his own, written or spoken, which might else 
escape ni} r knowledge? The matter is not pressing, for his 
rich journals and correspondence, out of which, I trust, the 
story will mainly be woven, are by his will left under seal till 
at least five years are gone; 3 T et I should be glad before that, 
and the sooner the better, to work up all I can find outside. 

I but mention now, in passing, the episodes of his simple 
life—his New England birth, at Griswold, in eastern Con 
necticut, on a summer day of 1835; his migratory childhood, 


a President Angell. 


189 





190 


AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 


sojourning with his parents, now in central New York, now 
at one or another village of southern Michigan, till, in the 
middle forties, they brought up at Detroit; his school days 
there and his college years at Ann Arbor and at Yale; the sem¬ 
inary days at New Haven and Andover; his brief career (1859- 
1862) as a Congregational pastor at Owego, on the Susque¬ 
hanna, and Poughkeepsie, on the Hudson; the breaking health 
and broadening views which drove him from the ministry, 
and the fresh, new life of out-of-doors and exercise, with the 
revelation of “ muscular Christianity ” which it brought; his 
mission to England, at the instance of Dr. Dio Lewis, to preach 
this new gospel of health; his fruitful stay there (1863-1866) 
as lecturer and writer, and the new life of the pen which 
opened for him through his correspondence with American 
journals; his home-coming and his career upon the lecture 
platform; the call to a professorship of literature at the Uni- 
versity of Michigan, and the long years of service there 
(1867-1881) broken only by his editorial year in charge of the 
Christian Union (1873-74) during the famous trial of Mr. 
Beecher; the long home stretch of twenty years (1881-1900) 
as professor of American history at Cornell. 

Let me rather ask, with you, What has it all been worth to 
us, this life of toil with voice and pen? Of the former, his 
work as public lecturer and as teacher—though it was on the 
platform I first saw and began to love him, and though for 
years 1 have been his colleague and an observer of his meth¬ 
ods—I hesitate as yet to speak. Our common fellow-teacher, 
Professor Jenks, who was his pupil at the University of 
Michigan, has in a capital sketch put on record his own mem¬ 
ories/' “Few students,” he writes, “who had the good for¬ 
tune to elect work with him * * * will ever forget his 

courteous manner, his exquisite diction, his keen appreciation 
of literary style, his gift of humorous critical comment. 

His students felt that he required exactness and 
finish in their work, and all shrank from the silent reproof of 
his manner when slovenly, inaccurate work was presented. 
Precision, accuracy, truth, he demanded from himself, and 
he expected them, so far as immaturity would permit it, from 
his students.” * * * Yet, “while he might be rigid in 

his just demands for faithfulness, he was no less appreciativ 


e 


°In The Michigan Alumnus, March, 1901. 



MOSES COIT TYLER. 


191 


and generous in his recognition of good work faithfully done. 
Many a student can recall a word of praise, discriminatingly 
given, which he has felt as a stimulus for many years there¬ 
after.” 

Of the published fruits of his pen the tale is not long. 
Besides an early booklet or two on physical culture ° and those 
old letters from across the sea, a few of which were not lonu- 
ago gathered into a volume as Glimpses of England/ together 
with one or two tasks which, like his revision of Morley’s 
English Literature c or his little memorial of Edgar Apgar/ 
were mere incidents to his life as teacher or as citizen, his 
life work as a writer sums itself up almost wholly in his his¬ 
tory of American literature. That the volumes devoted to 
the colonial period busied him during almost the whole of his 
stay at Michigan, 6 and that it was not till near the end of his 
long career at Cornell that there appeared those on the liter¬ 
ary history of the Revolution/ anticipated slightly by the 
little volume on Berkeley, Dwight, and Barlow/which is but 
a detached part of the same great work, 1 can hardly need to 
tell you. More novel, doubtless, might be what 1 could tell 
of the cost of the work to its author—of the endless pains¬ 
taking, the relentless thoroughness, the exacting fastidious¬ 
ness; or of the devotion and the system which alone made it 
possible, in spite of academic interruptions and never too cer¬ 
tain health, to accomplish so much—of the house-top study 
and the unbroken morning hours (close friend though T have 
been, I confess to never having disturbed him in the morning 
and to having entered the study only since his death), of the 
classification, topical and alphabetic, minute to a degree which 
would make most of you smile. 

But “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and we 
may perhaps better ask, now that the years have begun to 
test the outcome, whether all this zeal may not have failed of 
its mark, or perhaps have overshot it. On such a point my 
studies have given me small right to pronounce; but happily 
one whose competence none will question, a student like him- 

« Notably his Brawnville Papers, Boston, 1869. 

b Glimpses of England, Social, Political, Literary, New York, 1898. 

c New York, 1879. 

din Memoriam: Edgar Kelsey Apgar, Ithaca, 1886. 

<'They were published in 1878. 

/New York, 1897. 

{/Three Men of Letters, New York, 1895. 





192 


AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 


self of both our literature and our history, Professor Trent, 
has lately weighed it for us in a study notable alike for its 
charm and for its keen though sympathetic insight . a To the 
industry and learning of Professor Tyler he gives unstinted 
praise. He notes, indeed, as others have done, the startling 
generosity with which the historian of American literature 
welcomes to his pages unknown names and his enthusiasm for 
much that hardly passes mediocrity; but he admits that where 
he came to scoff he has more than once remained to pray, and 
is fain at last to find the chief value of the masterpiece in 
precisely this abounding sympathy and this scholarly inclu¬ 
siveness. He does not fail, indeed, to see what he deems 
more real faults—a certain over-elaboration, a sometimes irri¬ 
tating facetiousness, a tendencj^ to lapse into that half-playful, 
half-pretentious trifling which his own generation, once so 
prone to it, called “lucubration;” yet these he counts but 
petty flaws in the “true man and admirable writer” whose 
clear and readable style, whose acumen, whose sound canons 
of esthetic criticism, whose tastes, “sturdy and healthy, yet 
by no means lacking in delicacy,” whose wide culture and 
thorough independence, he eloquently sets forth. Surely such 
achievement was worth even such effort. 

In the American Literature, I said, his work as a writer sums 
itself almost wholly up. Yet not quite. We have at least the 
Patrick Henry 6 to show us with how subtle and how sure a 
pen he could deal with political history as well, and to deepen 
our grief at the loss of that biographical history of American 
statesmanship in the nineteenth century on which lie was busy 
when death came. It must have been far advanced; for. on 
my last tramp with him, a fortnight or so before the final ill¬ 
ness, he told me with gusto of sundry things he had learned 
while at work upon the Sumner, and I certainly gathered that 
this study, with earlier ones, was at least provisionallv com¬ 
plete. It was characteristic of the man that before his going 
he saw to it himself that all such papers were destroyed. Of 
this book (as of those further chapters of the American Lit¬ 
erature, for which some have hoped) nought will ever see the 
light. A single article, seemingly left in readiness for the 
press, may be sent to the printer; but that is all. 

Yet let me not limit to this lost book and to his Patrick Henry 

«In The Forum, August, 1901. 

^Nevv \ ork, 1887. (American Statesmen series.) 



MOSES COIT TYLER. 


193 


his work as a historian. Not less than these the American Lit¬ 
erature is history—the history not of an art but of a society. 
Not only is it everywhere suffused with a clear consciousness 
of the social and institutional life underlying American thought 
and letters, and radiant with many a Hash of insight into this 
world of affairs, but it is itself a study not of style but of 
life. Even to Professor Trent the main impression left by it, 
and that which its author wished to leave, is of democracy’s 
part in American life and culture. To Moses Coit Tyler his¬ 
tory was not past politics more than past literature: either 
had for him interest and worth only as key to that life and 
growth of which each is but an utterance. Before he began 
his story of our literature he had planned, as he told me, to 
write a history of the American people. What he did write 
was but a part of it. 

To a free people—like our own and that of our free mother¬ 
land across the sea—it is but natural to exalt into the foremost 
place the role of the citizen and that history which seems to 
fit him most directly for his tasks; and justly has been pointed 
out the worth to him who writes it of some personal share in 
politics or government. Yet, after all, that with which poli¬ 
tics has to do is the form of life, not its substance. To him 
who will sound that deeper current which is history’s best 
theme no sympathetic touch with life but has its worth; and 
much conspired to fit Moses Coit Tyler for his work. His 
Eastern birth and Western rearing, the Puritan traditions and 
convictions which shaped his earlier life, and the humanizing 
studies, the wider acquaintance, the freer air of the lecture 
field and of travel which gave breadth and color to his later, 
his experiences as a Congregational pastor and the widely dif¬ 
fering environment whose influence long after ripened in his 
entrance as deacon and as priest into the Episcopal clergy, all 
these, ave, even the accident of name which cousined him to 
the Virginia Tylers, had their share in the making of that 
historian whose catholic sympathy was sensitive to every hope¬ 
ful stirring of purpose or of taste in saint or sinner, Whig or 
Tory, Calvinist or Anglican, Yankee or Southron—who could 
without suspicion of prepossession or of malice reveal to us the 
numbers, the worth, the sound thinking, and the lofty aims 
of the American Loyalists or lay bare the mixture of cluirac- 
ter and of motive in the Fathers of the Republic. 

H. Doc. 702, pt. 1-13 




194 


AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 


Yet, at the heart of all, the measure of the historian is the 
man. Insight is less the daughter of experience than of sym¬ 
pathy. There is no 1 * 03^1 school for the study of human 
nature. Even those circumstances which did so much for the 
training of Moses Coit Tyler were less his tatc than his choice. 
To know the real secret of his work one must know himself. 

But it is no less true that the writer mirrors himself in his 
work. And if this be so, as men long have held, in that self- 
expression which is literature, doubly is it so in that inter¬ 
pretation of others which is history. No matter how thorough 
the historian’s research, how searching and conscientious his 
criticism, how scrupulously objective his narration, none the 
less surely he reveals himself. To divine a Shakespeare from 
a Hamlet or a Prince Hal is not easy; but it is because we 
can not know the ideal after which he shaped them. "The 
historian’s drama must be real: true not to life onty, but 
to life that has been lived; true in all its proportions and 
perspective; true to feeling, to motive, to character, to all the 
complex reality of life. Against that background of reality, 
shadowed in outline by the very light he bears, the his¬ 
torian stands himself revealed: revealed by the choice and 
limits of his theme, revealed by the selection and the testing 
of his materials, revealed by his conception of men and of 
events, revealed by the tone and temper of his treatment— 
seeing no more than he can grow in him the self to see and 
telling no more than self impels him to share—revealed by all 
he does, revealed yet more by all he fails to do. So much of 
himself the historian must give. If he will, he may well give 
more—something of the joy of his work, something of the 
cheer of sharing it, something of the love of men it kindles, 
something of that self-revelation which is the soul of compan¬ 
ionship—a warmth which is not passion and a color which is 
not prejudice, but the very glow of health on the living face 
of truth. 

If I am content for now to forego the tempting effort to 
describe you the man Moses Coit Tyler as it was mine to 
know him, it is because in both these wa} T s, as have few 
others, he has revealed himself in his books. Few have so 
toiled to make their every phrase the perfect expression of 
truth and of themselves. In his pages as clearly as in per¬ 
sonal acquaintance you ma}^ know that singular union of 


MOSES COIT TYLER. 


195 


austerity and boyishness, that exuberance of humor, that 
whimsical playfulness of fancy, that love of companionship, 
that fertility in anecdote, that unjaded interest in everything 
human under the sun, that glee in out-of-doors which to the 
very end made him in the open the most boisterous of us all 
and won from the staring farmers the answering shout of 
“Go it, boys!”—aye, and that devout and reverent inner 
self, that loftiness of soul, that refinement of taste, that 
dignity and serenity of temper, that irony the keener for its 
kindliness, which to us who knew him best made up the per¬ 
sonality of “the knight of the sunny countenance.” All is 
there for you in his books—quality and defect, nay, even his 
very quirks and foibles. And, balancing them all together, 
I doubt if the closest of us could find saner verdict than that 
of Professor Trent, who never saw him in the flesh—“true 
man and admirable writer.” 




































































